Mortaine’s Blog

Quick knitting update: I finished hint #3 yesterday while at my dad’s house. John and I went over for brunch and hung out all day with Dad and Kim, lounging around the back porch in the sun, making goofy faces at the dogs, watching a movie, and generally having a good time.

I finished Hint #2 early last week:

I’ve started on hint #3 as of yesterday.

Meanwhile, last week I also went to WEBS, which was awesome and magnificent, and I bought… well, I didn’t buy too much– just enough to feel like I’d indulged myself. I should have probably picked up yarn-on-cone, but… anyway. Here is some of the lovely pink laceweight I bought.

Next door to WEBS is the WEBS bead shop, where I bought some little coppery green-with-pink-tones beads to go with the yarn:

This eventual shawl is the counterpoint to the green Secret of the Stole (above), which is green yarn and pink beads. See? It’s like some kind of creative balance or something.0

On top of some cashmere/silk from WEBS and the beautiful slate blue yarn my friends gave me in Portland, I have certainly topped-off my yarn stash for the near future.

And yes, WEBS did break my shopping moratorium. I chalk it up to… you know what? I’m not going to make an excuse for this, nor am I feeling apologetic. It was a breach of the moratorium, but I don’t care. The laceweight was gorgeous and affordable. It was gorgeous yarn. The cashmere was on sale for $4/ball. I couldn’t not buy it!

I frogged the Magickal Earth Shawl. I was knitting it on size 3 needles. After 8 months of working on the edging (not consistently, mind you), I had 7 repeats of the edging pattern done. The edging calls for 48 repeats, which means I had one half of one side of the edging. It was already 5 feet long, which meant the “shawl” would have been 10′ x 10′. I was knitting it for my sister-in-law, but I know she and I are about the same height…. and I’m pretty sure she doesn’t need an alpaca-silk lace bedspread.

RIP:

And now the yarn is free again to be used for something else! Perhaps even the same shawl on smaller needles… but probably not. I didn’t like knitting it on the very small needles that the pattern really calls for.

I had something of a knitter’s hiatus last month. Between family visits, the funeral, trying to start up some writing gigs, and travel, I just didn’t have the extra “oomph” needed to fiddle with strings and sticks for a while.

In fact, I have had “finish kitty for swap” and “take photos of sweater” on my to-do list for so long, I had begun to despair of ever finishing either one.

Well, finally it is done. I have had time to finish the kitty, and pose for photos of the Susie Sweater:

I’ve also cast on for Secret of the Stole iii. Hint 1 is below:

The kitty: Don’t click through if you’re my kitty swap recipient and don’t want to spoil the surprise!:

(more…)

No, it’s not storming here. In fact, it’s a beautiful, sunny day (we should really get outside and enjoy it!)

So, since the weather is beautiful, why am I talking about storms? Because I recently frogged the KAL shawl I was working on, and it has been reborn as the storm shawl!

The center is a tight spiral, like a hurricane or storm pattern (coincidentally, also the kind of tight spiral I was looking for when I was considering making a galaxy shawl).

After this, there’ll be a lightning round– a round of the shawl that represents electrical lightning.

Then a round of rain, as captured by beadwork.

And finally, a wavy edged border to bind everything off.

I’ve knitted almost 40 rows of the spiral, and I like what it’s doing so far. Certainly, it is behaving much more now that I’ve embraced the chaos of this yarn and have stopped trying to make it conform to the rigid requirements of a mandala.